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Hepatic Tanager | Piranga flava
Levertangare | Piranga bermeja
The Hepatic Tanager is a tanager of tree crowns and forest edges with a very large range from the south-western United States to Argentina. It is often split into three species; the birds of Trinidad belong to the group of the Andes and the coastal mountains of Venezuela and Colombia, then treated as Piranga lutea. In the Caribbean it occurs only in the mountains of Trinidad.
Voice
The call is a short, dry chup. The song is a short series of clear, thrush-like whistles, repeated from a high branch.
Recording: Paul Molina Abril — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
17–20 cm, sturdily built, with a fairly thick, dark bill. The male is brick-red, greyer and duller above and brighter red on throat and breast, with greyish ear-coverts. The female is olive-green above and yellow below, with a greyish cheek. Young males are like females with orange-red patches.
Confusion species
Summer Tanager Piranga rubra, a winter visitor to Trinidad, has a pale bill; the male is a more uniform rose-red without a grey cheek, the female more mustard-yellow. Red-crowned Ant Tanager Habia rubica lives low in the forest, is darker reddish brown and has a red or tawny crown stripe. Male Silver-beaked Tanager Ramphocelus carbo is blackish red with a silvery-white lower mandible.
Habitat
The canopy and edges of montane forest and moist forest in the Northern Range, mainly above about 300 m, also clearings with tall trees, roads through forest and old secondary forest. It searches the crowns for insects and eats fruit; sometimes joins mixed flocks.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation types of the Caribbean.
Range and movements
On Trinidad a scarce resident in the higher parts of the Northern Range; absent from Tobago and elsewhere in the Caribbean. The group to which Trinidad birds belong ranges from Costa Rica through the Andes and the coastal mountains of Venezuela to Bolivia; other groups breed from the south-western United States to Nicaragua and in the lowlands of eastern and southern South America.
- Resident
- Winter visitor (c. Apr–Sep)
- Passage (Mar–Apr, Oct–Nov)
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
Along the Arima–Blanchisseuse road and other roads through the higher Northern Range, especially in early morning, when the birds perch in the tops of roadside trees. The short call helps to locate them in the foliage.
Conservation status
Not threatened in the broad species concept. The range is very large. On Trinidad the population is small and confined to the montane forests.
Scientific name
Piranga flava | (Vieillot, 1822)
Vieillot described the species in 1822 as S[altator] Flavus; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Piranga was introduced in 1808 by Vieillot. Piranga comes from the Tupi tijepiranga, the name of an unidentified small bird. flava is Latin for 'yellow', after the yellowish female. The specimen the first description was based on came from Paraguay.